Friday, July 31, 2015

"A pop up book for adults, this catalogue on the work of Franz Erhard Walther sought its inspiration in the artist’s work in order to determine the publication-form that might most appropriately convey the centrality of action to the artist’s oeuvre. The performativity at the heart of Walther’s more than a half century long practice is underscored through the appearance of six brightly coloured elementary pop up forms spread throughout the book."

Thursday, July 30, 2015

In this sixty-minute video from 1968, Nauman attempts to maintain the contrapposto pose (counterpose) associated with classical sculpture, while walking down a long, narrow corridor of his own making. In the position, the figure stands with most of its weight on one foot so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs.

The video was issued on DVD for the first time by the Deutsche Guggenheim to coincide with their exhibition Bruce Nauman: Theaters of Experience in 2003. It was housed between two pieces of embossed wood and priced at € 540.

Part of the impetus of the second show was to renew efforts to complete the original catalogue, which would now serve as a document of both. It launches tonight at Hart House (7 Hart House Circle, St. George Campus, University of Toronto) from 5 to 8pm. The book (and accompanying 10" vinyl record" is available for sale for $50, and the launch will feature DJ sets by Martin Arnold, Marc Couroux, Mitchell Akiyama.

If you're coming by car, please note the Pan Am games have closed off sections of Harbord Street. For more information, visit the facebook page here:

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Jeannie Thib died in Toronto, on Oct. 26, 2013, of cancer, aged 58. The Medallion portfolio, published by Katzman Contemporary, is inspired by an incomplete piece that Thib was working on at the time of her death. It features a collection of editioned multiples by thirteen of Thib’s close friends, - artists from Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. Produced in an edition of 50, the handmade solander box includes 8" x 8" work, each printed on archival materials ranging from rag paper to wood veneer. Techniques include: digital print, screen print, laser etch, drawing, embossment, and photography.

An artist book with no text, Fall contains two photographic sequences, composed of 11 images each, from the artist's films Fall 1, Los Angeles, and Fall 2, Amsterdam. The former begins with Ader seated in a straight-backed chair on the roof of his house and the latter sees the artist cycling into the canal in one of his most recognizable actions.

"This comprehensive reader gathers a broad spectrum of perspectives on the essence of conceptual art, its standing today, and ways in which conceptual art is collected and exhibited.

In this volume, twelve curators and art historians examine the past, present, and future of conceptual art and institutional critique, which are simultaneously in a ‘moment of historicisation’ and in the process of being absorbed into the institutional mainstream.

One of the more obscure editions published by Wolfgang Feelisch, this work consists of a laminated piece of graph paper cut into the shape of an isosceles triangle. The bottom right corner of both sides is stamped "Etc*." A string is attached to the top, suggesting it be hung.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Cameron and Black began an email correspondence regarding the nature of their shared 2012 exhibition at the Bodega a few months ago before it's opening. They discussed language and art, deciding that the former would form the predominant theme of the exhibition. Cameron's side of the conversation was typically earnest and direct, with Black more oblique and humorous.

The eventual exhibition featured a large, tall wooden table at the center of the gallery, two chairs at either end, and a bouquet of flowers at its center. It also included sculptures, paintings, a slideshow and this bookwork.

The publisher lists the title as out of print, but it is available from Art Metropole at it's original price of $15.00, here.

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Michael H. Shamberg has collaborated with a variety of artists and filmmakers including Robert Frank, Robert Longo, William Wegman and Chris Marker, but remains best known for his longterm work with the band New Order. He was the founder and former head of Factory Records U.S., and produced some of the group's best known videos, including "Blue Monday" and "True Faith". Shamberg was diagnosed with a progressive neurological disease in the early 2000s and died on November 1st of last year. New Order released a statement on their website that read:

"We are very sad to learn that our friend and colleague Michael H. Shamberg passed away on Saturday 1st November after a long illness...Michael was the founder of Factory US and New Order’s video producer, alongside his own work as film maker, teacher and director of Turtle Salon...His video production of "True Faith" earned "Best Music Video" at the Brit Awards 1988. We will miss him dearly and send our condolences to all his family and friends." Former bassist Peter Hook told the Manchester Evening News, "His work on our videos, so important at the time, defined our image and an era. He was a true revolutionary."

In 2011, New Order performed several benefit concerts for Shamberg and this double LP was released six month before his death, with the proceeds going towards the costs of his medical treatment. Put out by the Belgian counterpart of Factory Records, the disk features tracks by A Certain Ratio (who Shamberg made the short film Tribeca about), Cabaret Voltaire, Section 25, Quando Quango and others. It also features a live New Order song unavailable elsewhere.

The cover design is based on a New Order concert poster from 1983, designed by Lawrence Weiner, as seen below in Weiner's Posters: November 1965 - April 1986.

Recorded live at Massey Hall in Toronto, on the 15th of May, 1953, this forty-seven-minute LP marks the only time that Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker (credited as Charlie Chan for contractual reasons), Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach recorded together as a unit. It was also the last recording of Parker and Gillespie together.

Mingus, who co-owned Debut records, reportedly later overdubbed his bass lines to make his sound more prominent.

The cover graphic is by artist Arnaud Maggs, who worked as a successful designer until 1973, when - at the age of 47 - he gave it up to focus on his work as a visual artist.

“It was exciting to meet Mingus at his home and listen to the tapes with him. I created the cover on the subway ride back to my studio at 58 Park Avenue. Little did anyone know how famous this recording was to become” he later told Canadian Art magazine.

Friday, July 24, 2015

Compiled and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans, this CD accompanied an exhibition of the same name, at Between Bridges, Tillmans' Berlin non-profit gallery last year. The space was equipped with a high-end hi-fi sound system playing the same selection of 16 songs as the disk. The original master tapes and LPs (with artwork by Vaughan Oliver) were also on display, alongside a list of the original samples used by the band.

The cover art for the recording is from an unseen series of Tillmans' featuring the Canon Colour Laser Copier that he purchased with his Turner Prize winnings in 2000 (he was the first non-English artist to win the award). A decade later the machine was beyond repair so the photographer dismantled it as a 'deconstruction'.

"Brothers Martyn and Steven Young together with Ian Robbins, Lorita Grahame and Debian Curry were pioneers of experimental pop music. They created an eclectic sound drawing from reggae and soul influences, beat-box driven hip-hop rhythms, blue-eyed soul, as well as a fusion of far-ranging influences spanning from classic R&B, to dub and industrial. Using montages of analogue magnetic tape pieces and experimenting with tape machines, Colourbox were at the fore-front of sampling, which in it's digital form would become ubiquitous in the course of the 1980's. The band worked in a seeming contrast of pure artistic research in the studio and an anti-intellectual stance towards the outside world."

A four-song EP with a cover by regular collaborator filmmaker/photographer Eddie O'Keefe, whose second book, Young Ideas, was published earlier this year by Bywater Bros editions, and is available from Art Metropole, here.

Tomorrow evening MKG127 hosts a launch party for Instant Coffee's Pink Noise poster project. The launch takes place within the current exhibition by Geoffrey Pugen and features a performance by Dan Colussi of The Pinc Lincolns.

The posters are available for $20.00 each.

MKG127 is located in Toronto at 1445 Dundas St. West between Dufferin St. and Gladstone Ave. on the south side. The event runs from 7 to 9pm.

2002's Sea Change was Beck's 8th album, and first since the break-up of his long-time girlfriend stylist Leigh Limon. The sombre songs and more acoustic arrangements led to lowered commercial expectations, but strong reviews (Rolling Stone called it his best album and later one of the best of the decade) and a tour in which the Flaming Lips were both his opening act and backing band, helped the record reach number 8 on the Billboard chart. The disk was eventually certified Gold, selling approximately 700,000 copies in the US alone.

For the cover graphic, Beck commissioned artist Jeremy Blake to create four different images, overtop a portrait by Autumn de Wilde. Beck himself is credited with art direction. Blake's "digital paintings" also appear in the video for the lead off single "Lost Cause". Information about the collaboration is scarce, overshadowed by the story of Blake's death, and conspiracy theories that implicate Beck and the Church of Scientology.

Blake discovered the body of his girlfriend of twelve years, filmmaker and computer game designer Theresa Duncan, in their apartment on July 10th of 2007. The official cause of death was an overdose, assumed to be a suicide. Ten days later a woman called 911 to report a naked man walking into the ocean. Blake's wallet and clothes were found at the shore, alongside an apparent suicide note scrawled on the back of a business card: "I am going to join the lovely Theresa."

A fisherman found the 35 year old artist's body five days later. Blake's work had, at this point, already shown in three Whitney Biennials and had reached a larger audience via sequences he created for Paul Thomas Anderson's 2002 film Punch Drunk Love, starring Adam Sandler. Duncan was 40 at the time of her death. She had also been featured in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and had created three pioneering video games aimed at girls, one of which featured voice-over work by a then-unknown David Sedaris. Entertainment Weekly called it the "CD-Rom of the year" in 1995. Her writing appeared in Slate and Artforum and she penned a well-respected blog.

According to statements by acquaintances of the couple, Blake said that he and Duncan were being followed and harassed by Scientologists. He had reportedly amassed a 27-page "chronicle" of these allegations which he was preparing for a lawsuit he hoped to file. “I got the sense that they were genuinely afraid,” a friend told Vanity Fair, “It wasn’t just weird party conversation. There was a real fear there.”

The couple told friends of repeated late night phone calls, mostly hang-ups but sometimes ominous questions like “Did you have a good meeting today?”. They often spotted men watching them outside their house, or following them in cars. Duncan began obsessively photographing out-of-town license plates. One day while she was walking her Yorkshire terrier, a man approached and said, “What a sweet dog. It would be too bad if something happened to it.” Shortly afterwards they found a dead cat on their roof.

These intimidation tactics do not seem far removed from those later documented in Lawrence Wright's 2013 book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief and the widely seen HBO documentary of the same name, released earlier this year. But testimonials from neighbours and onetime friends also paint the couple as becoming dependent on alcohol and increasingly unhinged.

Duncan believed that Tom Cruise used his clout at Paramount Pictures to get her debut feature film Alice Underground cancelled. Beck had been set to star. Cruise is the highest profile adherent of the religion, and Beck is a second-generation member, as is his wife Marissa Ribisi (twin sister of actor Giovanni Ribisi). Beck's father, the Toronto-born composer and arranger David Campbell has been a member of the church for forty-five years. (Beck is also grandson to Fluxus artist Al Hansen).

“Beck and I met repeatedly to discuss the film,” Duncan wrote a friend, though the singer denied this in a Vanity Fair article (below): “We never met to discuss doing her film. I did read her script eventually.” He described his relationship with the couple as a "passing social acquaintance” in the article: “I met Jeremy in summer 2002 when we worked on the Sea Change artwork. After that, I saw him out a handful of times.… We exchanged occasional e-mails. The last time I heard from them was 2004.”

Photographs of Duncan, Blake, Beck and a pregnant Ribisi relaxing on a Malibu beach might suggest otherwise. More troubling is an interview from August 2003, originally overlooked as it was published in Italian. Speaking with Sandra Cesarale, Beck spoke of a his forthcoming film debut:

"It will be full of energy and full of characters: some kind of Alice in Wonderland set in the 70s. It still doesn’t have a title. The director is a friend of mine and it will be her directorial debut. But I trust her. We will begin shooting in the Fall."

A film based on Alice in Wonderland, directed by a woman as her first feature certainly sounds like a description of Duncan's project. Beck has never acknowledged the discrepancies between the two accounts.

Another mysterious aspect of the story feeding the conspiracy minded is that the Vanity Fair article’s original author, John Connolly, was reportedly pulled from the story and replaced by Nancy Jo Sales, the ex-wife of Father Frank Morales, a friend to Duncan and Blake who was there when Duncan’s body was discovered. Connolly, an ex-NYPD detective and stockbroker, has subsequently been accused of covertly working on behalf of the church, infiltrating media outlets (for more, click here).

A season 18 episode of Law & Order was apparently based on the case (the Scientologists are replaced by a group called the Systemotics) and author Bret Easton Ellis was said to be writing a screenplay about their deaths, with Gus Van Sant attached to direct. More recently Italian-Argentine filmmaker Gaspar Noé has been listed as the potential director. He is reportedly in negotiations with actor Ryan Gosling to star as Blake.

Dedicated to Artists’ books, multiples, recordings, postcards, magazines and ephemera, this site will feature reviews of recent titles, features on artists and publishers, random listings of older works, the occasional longer essay or interview, straight-forward pictorials,links to recent news, etc. etc., in an attempt to create an aggregate of information on editioned artworks.

About Me

Dave Dyment is an artist, writer and curator based in Toronto, Canada. He is the co-editor of "One for Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions" (YYZ Books, 2012). His own work can be viewed at www.dave-dyment.com. He is represented by MKG127.